Today, the Internet continues to grow as a medium for delivering content. One of the factors driving the growth and success of the Internet as a medium for delivering content is the proliferation of high-speed Internet access to the home. This provides a high quality data channel to the home of consumers and allows for marketers and other individuals to provide quality commercial video and audio to the home user. Thus, the Internet offers a high quality and flexible medium for presenting media content, which is typically commercial advertising content, to the end user.
The excellent connectivity of the Internet has also driven the use of this medium for delivering commercial video and audio to the home user. To deliver high quality content, often large data files need to be moved across the Internet. One problem faced by content owners or providers is how to cost-effectively deliver these large files in such a way that the quality of service and the quality of the media received by the end user is sufficient for the task at hand. To address these problems, companies have developed content delivery networks (CDN) that are well suited for delivering high quality commercial video over the Internet cost effectively and with good quality of service.
One example of a content delivery network and service is the network and service offered by the Akamai Company of Cambridge, Mass. Akamai provides a content delivery service that cost effectively delivers content across the Internet. To that end, Akamai established a content delivery network that comprises a set of servers, called edge servers, that are disposed at certain network locations on the Internet. These network locations correspond to geographic locations that have been determined by Akamai to be proximate to a large number of Internet users. Thus the edge servers are placed at a location where they are physically close to a large number, if not the majority, of Internet users and as such they are described as being at the edge of the network, at the point right before the Internet connects to the home user. Delivering content from these edge servers down to local users is thus understood to be quick and relatively affordable. By contracting with Akamai, a content owner or provider can store content at these edge servers. When the home user requests content from the content provider, Akamai can deliver that content to the user from the closest edge server by identifying the edge server that has the requested content and that is most proximate to that user.
Thus, the content delivery network of Akamai acts as a large cache system that is strategically located across the Internet and that can store content for delivery to an end user. To manage the cache memory, Akamai provides tools, such as the advanced cache control system, that make a content provider's web pages cacheable and that adjust pages being served from the cache so that they appear to have been served from the site of the content provider. Other cache management tools are also provided. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 7,010,578, assigned to Akamai Technologies of Cambridge, Mass. there is disclosed a system for organizing third party cache appliances into cache memory devices that can be made part of a content delivery network. Additionally, U.S. Pat. No. 7,143,170 discusses a system for the automatic migration of data via a distributed computer network. The disclosed method and apparatus allow a customer to select content files that are to be transferred to a group of edge servers. The edge server maintains a dynamic number of popular files in its memory for the customer and the files are ranked from most popular to least popular. When a file has been requested from an edge server a sufficient number of times to become more popular than the lowest popular stored file, the file is obtained from an origin site. Thus, these technologies expand the size and number of locations of the content delivery network and the control over these servers, thus increasing the efficiency and flexibility of that network.
Although content delivery networks can work quite well and provide the CDN owner with tools for efficient and effective delivery of large data files, there is a need in the art to provide for more robust mechanisms for allowing content owners or providers who are CDN customers to ensure how their content files are delivered from the cache memories of the content delivery networks.